GXO is expanding Digit to 2 more warehouses, but they're still chasing ROI
Digit's getting more jobs
GXO Logistics and Agility Robotics announced today they are expanding their humanoid robot partnership from one warehouse to three.
The new sites are in Statesville, North Carolina and Lebanon, Tennessee, both focused on e-commerce fulfillment, but deployments begin in early 2027. On the same day, GXO's CEO said, publicly and clearly, that the company has not achieved return on investment with humanoid robots yet, and does not expect to for a couple of years.
Both of those statements are true at the same time. That is the actual state of humanoid robots in commercial logistics in late 2026.
What GXO and Agility have built together
The partnership started in late 2023 with an industry-first pilot at GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia facility, the first time a humanoid robot ran in live commercial logistics operations. In June 2024, they signed what was billed as the industry's first multi-year Robots-as-a-Service agreement for humanoids. Since then, Digit has been running continuously at the Georgia site, moving totes alongside existing automation.
As of today, Digit has moved over 100,000 totes at that facility. It performs a set of repetitive tasks: picking items from autonomous mobile robots and placing them on conveyors, stacking totes, relocating materials between floor positions. It is not doing complex pick-and-pack. It is doing the kind of work that is highly repetitive, physically demanding, and genuinely hard to automate with conventional fixed robotics because the geometry of the task changes in ways that require flexible, humanoid-shaped manipulation.
The new North Carolina and Tennessee sites will start on Digit 4, then upgrade to Digit 5 when available, expected in early access in the first half of 2027 and general availability by end of 2027.
The whole operation runs through Agility Arc, the company's cloud fleet management platform.
The ROI gap, stated plainly
A good detail to note is what GXO CEO Patrick Kelleher said about humanoid robots in August 2026: "We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet. I think we are a couple of years away from that."
He also disclosed that GXO has completed 45 humanoid robot pilots across multiple vendors. Of those 45, zero have progressed to production deployment across GXO's broader network. Agility's Georgia site is the one exception, and it is what earned the expansion announcement today.
That's pretty important context both ways.
One, the announcement framing emphasizes commercial momentum and enterprise demand, and those things are real. But two, 45 pilots, one production site, no ROI yet, and a couple-years-away horizon is a realistic picture of where the industry actually is in large-scale enterprise logistics.
Agility is doing good work here, clearly.
But that does not mean there's no more development and innovation to create.
The Digit 5 order book and the SPAC
Agility has disclosed over $300 million in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5. That number carries a significant caveat: it is heavily concentrated in a single customer agreement, and the orders are subject to contractual milestones, product features, and delivery specifications.
It is a binding commitment, but not a simple purchase order waiting to be fulfilled.
The customer list for Digit v4, deployed or committed, includes GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Mercado Libre, AGCO, and Amazon. Three additional unnamed enterprise customers are in paid programs: a major global automaker, a large automotive components developer, and a leading consumer products manufacturer. The pipeline includes 30-plus prospective customers in active discussions or Agility's Customer Acceleration Program.
Agility is also preparing to go public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money valuation, with over $620 million in expected gross proceeds. The ticker would be AGLT on Nasdaq, targeted for Q4 2026.
One site to three: what it actually means
Moving from one commercial deployment to three is a real milestone.
It is perhaps the first time a humanoid robot has gone from a single live pilot to a deliberate multi-site rollout in logistics at a major enterprise operator. It shows that the Flowery Branch results were good enough to justify expanded commitment, and that GXO is not just tolerating the experiment but investing in it.
We don't know yet that the economics work at scale, that the ROI case is solved, or that humanoid robots are about to flood the warehouse sector. Kelleher's comment about being "a couple of years away" from ROI is important to remember.
It's probably an accurate read from the person operating the most advanced commercial humanoid deployment in logistics right now.
Agility's CEO Peggy Johnson said that "Customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them."
Sure. But ROI needs to happen too.
Sources
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I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”